I applied to my Italian citizenship in the Italian Consulate in London and got it a couple of months ago. I went 3 weeks ago to the consulate to apply to my passport and they said that because it's my first passport it needs clearance from Italy (although I received my citizenship through the same consulate). They initially said it usually takes 3-4 weeks and when I called this week they said they've had no response and that it takes about 5 weeks. Has anyone had this same problem before? It seems quite strange that if I got my citizenship in the consulate they now need to confirm in Italy that I'm really a citizen... I'm becoming frustrated after the long citizenship process so any information will be appreciated.
Thanks,

I submitted my final application to the New York consulate in late June, 2008. Two weeks later, they prepared a letter which said my application was approved, that they forwarded my documents to my ancestral comune, and that I could come in and apply for my passport at any time; the letter went into the mail about 3-1/2 weeks later and I received it a total of six weeks after my application submittal.

It was a few months before I was able to get back down to the city, but I finally submitted my passport application and received it in the mail a few days later.

On the other hand...

Several US consulates require applicants to wait until their documents have actually been registered in their ancestral comune and then the applicant must request and obtain a copy of their "Italian birth certificate" before they can apply for a passport. In my mind, this raised the possibility that the comuni have the final say in whether or not an application is approved but in other conversations it seems this is not likely. So, barring that, the other thoughts which come to mind are,

a) some bureaucrats don't like putting the cart before the horse; They want to ensure that the documentation has been recorded at the ancestral comune before a passport is issued

b) some consulates may reference the birth record numbers from the ancestral comune in their passport files; obviously they cannot do this unless the record has already been created

During the mass emigration from Italy during the century between 1876 to 1976, the U.S. was the largest single recipient of Italian immigrants in the world. However, their impact was not as great as countries like Argentina and Brazil. That was due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of immigrant...

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